National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

This report is a summary of the specialist meeting of NCGIA Initiative 19: ‘The Social Implications of How People, Space, and Environment are Represented in GIS’. The meeting brought together researchers and graduate students from the US and Europe and represented a spectrum of the Geography discipline. Deliberations began in an opening plenary session where the steering committee identified three core conceptual issues: 1) epistemologies of GIS; 2) GIS, spatial data institutions, and access to information; and 3) developing alternative GISs. Subsequent small group and plenary discussions generated the following seven research focus areas:GIS 2 and virtual geographies; GIS social practice and intellectual history; Environmental justice and political ecology; GIS in the community: local knowledge and multiple realities; Data access, privacy and geodemographics; Gender and representation; and Geographic Information (and Systems) and the human dimensions of global environmental change.